YouSaid · the spoken record

Brian Eno

lines on the record

83

first

2026-07-21

most recent

2026-07-21

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1

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Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

1. “Yep, well, I'd take that even an atheist like me would say, It depends how big the word God is for you, and if it's big enough, I can accommodate ideas like that. So I'm going to choose a gospel record, and it's a strange one. It's the consolers. The consolers were a couple, Sullivan and Iola Pew, P-U-G-H. You know, I asked myself the question after going to this museum I mentioned in Lausande, the Museum of Outsider Art. I thought, what's outer music, I wondered. And then I thought, well, actually, the whole of pop music is really outside of music in that it didn't come out of academies or institutions. It's just people doing stuff together. And I think as outsider artists, the consolers, Sullivan and Iola stand absolutely unmatched.”

   2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “Now, I've got to do number three. That means I've only got one choice left. This is very difficult. See, so much of the music that has really affected me is religious music, which is funny because I'm sort of an atheist. But the thing about religious music, I think, that is so special is that it's made by people and it's made by people for other reasons than I want to pull a chick. I want to make a lot of money or I want to dance. Now, all of those things are fine. I have no problem with them, but the majority of popular music comes out of those kinds of feelings, I think.”

   2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Beautiful, beautiful record, beautifully controversial in many ways because in fact I think it was probably without that record I wouldn't have been a pop musician. I don't know what I would have done. I'd probably been an art teacher or something but that record made me think this is something I could do. And I think it made a lot of other people think that. I know so many musicians who say that was the record that really made things happen for me.”

   2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Now, I'd been listening to a lot of black American music because of where I grew up in Suffolk, which had a lot of American air bases, but it was pop music, do-op and stuff like that. I loved it. When I heard those recordings, I thought, okay, this is the soil that that stuff grew out of. And I loved it. It was such, such rich soil. I think the second one that I have to name, because it still remains as one of the most moving records to me, is the Velvet Underground's third album. Which had the song Pale Blue Eyes”

   2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Okay, I can respond to that. One that really made a huge impression on me was a folkways record called the rural folk blues. And they were sort of semi-field recording. Some of them were actually records that had been made, but they all dated from the 20s, 30s, and 40s. And they were black American music.”

   2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Weird decaying aristocracies all woven in with crooks and priests and so on. So there's three books and I just want to suggest one other thing which is a subscription to the London Review of Books. Probably the best intellectual reading in the English language, I think. It's amazing. Comes out every two weeks. If you're interested in books, the London Review of Books for me beats the New York Review of Books or the Times Literary Supplement or any of those things.”

   2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Build a house, so that's my second one. It's a great read, and you would love it. My third one is Naples 44 by Norman Lewis. Norman Lewis was a British intelligence officer who was sent to Naples when the Germans had been beaten out of there. And he was sent there to find out whether there were nascent fascist groups still working in Naples. And he kept a diary. And this is the most fabulous diary you'll ever read. It's just both hilariously funny, deeply moving, and totally confusing. And you realize that Naples was like another planet. It's like reading sci-fi, some of it, the strangeness of that little world of Naples with its intertwining of Deep religiosity, deep criminality, deep love of the senses, incredible attention to food.”

   2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Second book, I think I'm going to suggest is a book by the architect Christopher Alexander called A Pattern Language. And it's really a book about habitat, about what makes spaces welcoming and fruitful or hostile and barren. And it's the most beautiful book. So it talks about things at the biggest scale possible. countrywide, nationwide scale down to the scale of the molding of a banister or something like that and tries to understand why some of those things work and why they don't and it's such a lovely book to read over the course of my life i've bought i would say 60 copies of that book now because i i always give it to anyone who is about to renovate a house or about”

   2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Okay, so this was a very hard question. Three is not very many books and I thought quite hard about them. So one of the books, it's called Printing and the Mind of Man. It was the catalogue really of an exhibition that was at the British Museum in 1963. And it was about the history of printing. But actually the book is about the most important books in the Western canon and the impact that they had when they were released starts with the Gutenberg Bible. But it's such a fascinating book because you really start to understand where the big fundamental ideas that made Western culture It doesn't have any Arabic books or any Indian books or any Chinese books. So it's really about the last 500 years in Western culture and it's probably the most fascinating book about intellectual history that I've ever read. And it's a very beautiful book because it was put together by a great printer who used lots of beautiful types and so on. It's a wonderful book.”

   2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Getting people to understand that we might be the only life. It might all be on this one place. And bloody hell, shouldn't we look after it a bit better then? Those things make me constantly think and constantly be sort of grateful for the fact that I'm alive. I remember reading this comment from a New York taxi driver. Who's driving the taxi? And he says he turns to the customary, says, O life I'm so glad I got in I just love that the idea that it's like an amazing show at a theatre and you manage to get a ticket to see it I appreciate that kind of gratitude”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “That's absolutely true, yes. Acid does produce good results in some people. Not in me, unfortunately. So Stuart sort of gave birth to this idea, I think, that if we could show the world from the outside, if we realized What this tiny, what an amazing extraordinary, unique gift was, this tiny little planet teeming with life Swimming around in a dead universe, as far as we know. We still don't know that there's any other life in the universe, which is phenomenal if you think about it. We still don't know. We might be the only life in the universe. I think about that nearly every day. I think it's the most sobering thought. I think that should be shouted from the rooftops every day. That's my version of seeing the whole earth from”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “Well, all these people you're naming are people who had a huge impact on me. Stuart was in the army during, I guess it was the time of career or just afterwards. Yes, just after career, I guess. He was in the army and I don't think he was ever ashamed of being in the army. I think he enjoyed it. And he left the army and became a hippie, became one of the... Sort of foundational hippies around Timothy Leary and Kenkesi and that group of people. And he's always been a very big thinker and a very long-term thinker. And one of his early thoughts was If people on earth could see a picture of the earth from the moon, it would change our consciousness of the earth.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Oh, such a sweet friend. Probably the hardest working artist I know. She absolutely never stops, and she is always working on half a dozen projects in 10 different parts of the world. And I think she's the only person I know who can fly all night, not sleep, come straight into a meeting and be absolutely there. She's remarkably low maintenance person. She's always there and always sharp.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Yes, yes, certainly. That definitely happened with me. I can definitely say from the moment I heard it's going to rain. Music was a different thing”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “And the door it opened was not just to do with the way in which he made it, which was itself very impressive using an absolute minimum of material, 0.8 seconds of material, I think it was. That piece works by making your brain behave in a certain way. You are not an inactive listener in that. All of his work, I think, depends on making your brain perform and watch itself performing in a certain way. So I suddenly thought then, oh, the composer isn't just Steve Reich. It's Steve Reich and my brain that's making this composition what it is. And that thought never left me that you actually are engaging the technology of the listener's brain to complete the piece. They're not passive.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “While Steve Reich was a very important part of my listening because he made a piece called It's Gonna Rain that. Opened a door for me.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “I think the guy should sound a little bit more nervous like he's working in an office and he hasn't been there very long and doesn't quite know how you're supposed to behave in the office. Then he goes back out and does this other vocal and suddenly you hear the transition from this confident strong hairy macho guy to somebody who's a little bit timid and has doesn't quite know whether he should be saying the things he's saying. And seeing him fine-tune that was very impressive.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “One of the most Committed artists I've ever worked with in the sense that he He really thought about what he was doing, just to tell you a short story. I remember being in the studio with him doing, he was doing a vocal on one of the songs. I can't remember the song. So he does the vocal and he comes back into the control room, listening back to it. He says, it's a bit lumberjack, isn't it? And I knew exactly what he meant. And he said,”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “I think the thing that really impressed me about Cage was not his music, which I didn't particularly care for after the 1940s, but his idea that being a composer was a kind of a practice in the sense of a religious or a spiritual or a philosophical practice. And I thought that's the kind of artist I want to be. I want to have a practice. I want there to be resonances into other parts of my thinking. I don't want it to just be something that I do on the weekends and then forget about. So caged with his book's silence was very important for me. That came along just the right time for me.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “For people who don't want to learn how to program them, which turns out is most people. I remember talking to Yamaha once who produced the most successful synthesizer of all time, which was the DX7. And I said, you know, you should really make these a little bit easier to program. And they said, well, we don't bother because nobody tries to change them anyway. We often get them back for repair. And we can tell if somebody's tried to change the programming. And nobody's ever done it. They've just used the presets. And that seems to me a kind of mental laziness that I really don't think fits well with making new things.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “they might be good buildings but he said in the end we went back and i i went to visit him one day when they were working on a big new complex for some place in texas and what they were using were matchboxes and pens and packets of tissues it was completely analog and there was no sense at all that this had any relationship to what the final product would be in terms of how it looked so it meant that what you were thinking about was how does it work what do we want it to be like to be in that place you started asking the important questions again not what kind of facing shall we have on the building or what kind of color should the stone be and when i see people fiddling around with um synthesizers this has always been a problem with synthesizers that they always come with a bank of sounds ready made”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “Yes, I think what bothers me, which is exactly part of what you're saying, is the possibility of not making a mistake at all, of making things that always come with this sort of professional finished gloss of what a real pop song looks like or what a real picture looks like. And I think that's lethal. I have a friend, an architect friend called Rem Koolhaas. He's a Dutch architect. He uses this phrase the premature sheen. So when in his architectural practice, when they first got computers and computers were first good enough to do proper renderings of things, he said, everything looked amazing at first. You know, you could construct a building in half an hour in the computer and you'd have this amazing looking thing. And he said, but it didn't help us make good buildings. It helped us make things that looked like...”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “None of the other instruments that usually fill in the harmonic information in between. There are lots of tricks like that, but they're sort of ways of looking at the system as it stands and thinking what hasn't been done yet with this system, what might excite people. You see, I think that music grows out of excitement. And if you aren't feeling excitement, then you try to create it in some way. If the situation isn't turning you on, then you try to change it until it does turn you on. Because when you're excited, you are at your most alert, I think. And when you're at your most alert, you're most likely to spot Little thing that is going to turn into the big thing.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Meant to do a particular job, record something, and play it back later on. So build something new in real time. So I think that's to do with technology, to do with people. So the first thing I think about when I look at a band, I think, okay, so there are, let's say, five people in that band. How many possible duets is that? Many possible trios, how many possible quartets, how many solos five obviously, and how many everybody won. Now very often happens that that space has not been explored properly by the band. People haven't thought, what about if only three of us play in this? And then another slightly different configuration of three play. So it's a very simple thing, but it suddenly unlocks a set of possibilities that probably hadn't been explored before what happens if we only have vocalist drums and bass.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Yes. So I have a few mental tricks that I use, which I think are just naturally part of me. One of them is when I'm faced with a piece of technology which can do something, I immediately don't want to know about what it can do. I want to know what it can do that the makers didn't imagine it would ever be used to do. the type of technology that I work with, musical technology, that's a very rich open territory. And it's rich and open because not that many people explore it. You know, they have something that says this will make your mixes sound louder. And they use it to make mixes sound louder. Well, you know, don't blame them. That's what it says on the box. But you will also find out that that can do something else that nobody had ever thought of doing with music before. So that was an example of using something that was...”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “Yeah. So, first of all, if you're going to do work with AI at all, you have to, as my friend Danny Hillis says, you have to start off by saying, please don't flatter me.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “It's not even what we like, actually. As humans, we like a certain amount of predictability, but only a certain amount. We don't want it exactly the same each time. So, you know, we rely on our interest being taken by a deviation we didn't expect. The sycophancy is the thing that really drives me mad when it says good question, Brian. That's a really good question.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Anything, let's say, artistic using ChatGPT or any of the other programs, it has a very interesting progression when you're doing it. The first thing you make, you think, bloody hell, that's pretty amazing. And then after half an hour or so, you think, I'm so bored. And I remember that thing that Samuel Johnson Said about something I can't remember what it was about now, but he said it's a little bit like watching an animal walk, a dog walk on its hind legs. You're not interested in how it walks, but just that it can. You're sort of impressed by the fact that it can do something that is really quite like a human being. But then you find out that it's like a quite dull human being. And it kind of doesn't get more exciting unless you can trick it into some sort of aberration. Which is what I've been trying to do.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “Yes, that's right. When I was a kid and I liked watercolor painting a lot and I used to notice that after a day of painting the water that I was dipping my brush into, which was of course a mixture of all the colours I had touched that day, was always the same colour. Actually, I called it munge, M-U-N-G-E. Munge is sort of purpley brownie, horrible color, basically. And whenever I've tried creating things on chat GPT, I haven't done that much of it, actually. I work very hard to get my prompts right and to filter what I'm saying to and trying to edge it into something interesting. But the color of Munge covers all of it. It's so over digested. And of course it's quoting things. It's using things on the basis of how frequently they have appeared. I don't know whether you've ever tried making.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Genius being used all the time because it never seemed to me like it was just one person who was doing everything. So I came up with this word seniors, which is seen with an iUS on the end. And that seemed to me to much better understand the ecology of systems like that. And I think that's what it is. It's an ecosystem and we still don't understand ecosystems. It's still not intuitive to most of us to understand how a thing like an ecosystem works, how there are lots and lots of nodes and they're collected in very complicated ways. And if you move one of the nodes to a different place, everything else in the system has to shift. Anyone who's become interested in the environment has started to become aware of how complex natural systems are. Human society is a natural system as well and the society of knowledge that we all share.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “It turned out that some of the very important people were the collectors who would specifically target certain artists and say, I want to keep this person alive. I'm going to support this person. Or they would go to Paris and buy pictures that they brought back to St. Petersburg and Moscow to show to painters there and say, look, this is what's going on in Paris now. And then there were the people who ran the salons who would invite artists to meet up with each other and talk to and so on and so on. The cafe owner, the cafe that everybody used to hang out in, who was quite conscious that they had a part to play in the scene and they would let people not pay for their meals and so on and put it on the tab. And so I thought there was a whole scene here that was fertile, that was operational. There was a whole support system. And so I had got sick anyway of hearing this word.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “Okay, so that was an attempt to try to understand that. I had been studying the early 20th century painting in Russia. There was a 20-year period when there were amazing amount of innovation going on, you know, suprematism, constructivism, rayanism, all these different isms appearing. And I discovered that the scene was very complex. It wasn't just that there were a few brilliant artists like Kandinsky and Rodchenko and Tatlin and so on.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “Yes, especially if you're trying to inspire confidence in them. You want people to willingly participate in them rather than having it forced upon them. Do you know this word that I came up with years ago, which is senius?”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Would be saying we're not claiming to be the geniuses here, we're claiming to be the people who know how to corral it all, how to put it together, how to make it available to you. But thank you for all the stuff you've written, Ezra and Brian and everybody else. And with your permission, we'll redistribute this to society. It's so obvious to me that that should be the way. But of course that is not the American way at all. That sounds like socialism of some kind.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “This is the question I'm asking myself Should it be that we automatically have a system that says this is a social good all this knowledge it's a socially produced good and therefore its usage should reward society that's quite hard to meter of course it's hard to put a meter on it I think it has to be written into the whole machinery itself so that nobody has to make a decision For example, it wouldn't be a bad idea if everything that was generated in that way 50% of all the profits from it immediately go back to society in some way.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “Nastiness in some ways. I'm not saying, of course, that everything like that is like that on the internet, but what seems to have happened in the race for profits, we've managed to sidestep the friction that normally comes with things being born into the world. Friction is very important. Friction gives you a little time to see what's happening. It makes something ease into your life more slowly. So you can start to correct it as it's easing in. I always say it's like we've invented an amazing new type of car that can travel at 750 miles an hour, but we haven't put any brakes in it because brakes slow down the profits, basically.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “Underwrote it, that oh, let's make this amazing new medium where everyone can communicate with each other. Oh, but we've got to make a lot of money from doing it. In a way, the big mistake was when the algorithm became maximize engagement, which means maximize profits, of course. If maximize engagement is what you're going for, then you end up with what we have now, an internet that flourishes on anger and...”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “I think they mean the same thing. Now, of course, as a set of techniques, mine is much, much, much cruder and simpler and much more analog than the techniques that are generally being used in LLMs. And of course, the other big difference is that mine are not owned by Mad Billionaires. And I think that's an important difference. In fact, with all the discussion about AI, to me, the single most important question is who should be in control of it? And we've seen in this century what happens when billionaires control new technologies, social media I'm talking about. And we've seen that they you get completely unpredicted and quite disastrous results sometimes. You know, the collapse of democracy in most of our countries, I think, is very traceable to social media and to the kind of misunderstanding that”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “Conception of an architect is somebody who thinks about an end result in great detail, you know, the archetype is Frank Lloyd Wright who designed everything down to the teaspoons in his houses. And so the whole thing kind of pre-exists in the architect's mind and then is bought into being by builders. What a gardener does is puts some seeds in the soil and then watches how they develop. Oh, these ones over here are doing better than those ones over there. So next year I'll plant them differently. But you know that if you're making a garden, you're only starting something. So one of Stuart Brand's books, it's called How Buildings Learn. It's a great book. And in that he says, you never finish a building, you only start it. And I think that's what I kind of mean by generative music. You start the piece, but it finishes itself. It carries on finishing itself for the rest of time.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “And then you can build up, you can work on top of those. I mean, I discovered this in the 60s. So did Terry Riley and a few other people, I think, it just happened. I had two tape recorders for a while so I could try this out. And then I could build up these huge sort of orchestras of music live on my own. So I think that became an obsession to try to make a recorded music that somehow changed every time. I finally achieved it in the 1990s. And I'm still doing it now.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “Try to break them a little bit more, but so that they would still play things, so a tape playing through it would change into something else. You know, it would have a lot of distortion or it would run unevenly like this. I discovered that if I connected two tape recorders together, put one tape through one and coming out through the other so that the playback head is separated by several feet from the record head. you get a very late echo.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “You could play it backwards, and I just wanted to hear what things would be like if they were played backwards, discovering that, first of all, you can capture sound and make it physical. That was something new for the 20th century. But then I thought, if you can make it physical, can't you also make it mutate in certain ways? Can't you make it so the physical medium, for instance, is not reliable? It will play slightly differently each time. And so my first experiments in that direction were I had a collection of broken tape recorders, which I just got from junk shops, you know, or thrift stores, as you might say. And I would.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “My first clue to that was when I first got hold of a tape recorder. I had wanted a tape recorder. My whole childhood. I just thought the idea of being able to catch a piece of sound and make it physical was most magical thing I could think of, actually. And I had this obsession with...”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “Up until the turn of the 20th century, you could never have the same musical experience twice. There was no way that you could precisely repeat a musical experience. As soon as records came along, you could do that. You could hear exactly the same performance of exactly the same song over and over and over and over. And that became how most of us listened to music, unless we happened to be born into a musical family or a church group or something like that. Most of the music we heard was repetition. So, what I thought was, I wonder if you could use the technology of repetition to make music that constantly changes.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “Yes, that's right. So two things becoming important. What is the structure of rules, if you like? What are the possibilities that the system has? What are the limitations that it has? What are the materials you put into it? So if you make a wind chime out of glass, for instance, or out of bamboo rods or out of metal, they're all going to be slightly different results. But each one is a kind of package of possibilities. You're not specifically saying which possibilities you want to happen, but you're conditioning which group of possibilities can happen. And I thought that was a sort of a nice area for music to be in because if you”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “Chimes. Each one is a particular pitch. It's not going to change. It's only that pitch. But how and when they strike depends on the wind so it's sort of semi-random. So you can't really say that you composed that particular performance, though you can say that I built the system from which that performance emanated. You know, a wind chime is basically a simple piece of generative music.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “Well, you're right in your previous question. You asked, did I feel any responsibility for that? And I do, actually. I mean, I was very excited about the idea of generative music. I invented the phrase, I believe. And I was very excited by the idea of making a music like a seed. Seed is something that has a genetic message in it, and every manifestation of it will be a little bit different depending on where you plant it and what time of year it grew and so on and so on. So I thought, wouldn't it be nice if you had music like that? So, I mean, there's a very simple example of that. Wind chimes. A wind chime is a simple enough machine. Let's say you've got five.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “We have extremely loud bands and very, very, very quiet ones. It's as if we've taken every dimension in which music can exist and tried to expand it and say, what would happen at the edges now? Let's make a new edge.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “I think what's happened is that it's changed in both directions. So I think people are ready to accord music a level of attention that they never have done in the past. For instance, when you go to these extremely long concerts sometimes, 10 hours long, where you were basically listening to three sign tones for a very long time. That's a level of attention that really people never thought of giving until at least the middle of the 20th century and later so there's that. And then on the other hand, you have TikTok, or very short pieces of music like that, which of course right at the other end of the scale. But I think in culture, this is a general rule that every single standard, every single metric has increased in both directions. We now have extremely long pieces of music and extremely short one.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “Stress off yourself, not by pretending you weren't flying, so let's make it just sound like a disco or a nightclub or something like that, which is what most of the music tries to. Let's not do that. Let's say we're having an unusual experience and let's experience it as a beautiful experience.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source